Social Pointillism and Starry Nights: Making Points to Make Connections in the Sudanese Civil War

Abstract

The Pointillists – notably Georges Seurat and Paul Signac – were à la mode in the late 19th century. Their paintings relied upon a brushwork that placed points of colour to construct their representations. These points were placed such that when looked at as a whole they revealed a picture of some reality. This article argues the possibility of social pointillism, where the picture one is attempting to paint is of what happens in global social realities. Points in pointillism were daubs of colour. They painted pictures on canvases. Points in social pointillism are forces with powers. They create analytic canvases that reveal fields of power in the starry nights of human being. In order to make this argument, discussion begins at the Otello restaurant; proceeds to presentation of social pointillism; explains how social pointillism is relevant to a starry night ontology, and ends by identifying a virtue of employing such pointillism to paint pictures of starry nights.

Keywords

Sudan civil war the Council politics imperialism

Introduction

This article proposes a way of making points to make connections; connections that can reveal knowledge of hidden social realities. To begin to do so, consider the art scene in late 19th century France.

The Council

The African bureau [of the State Department] was the primary locus of policymaking for Sudan. (Petterson, 2003)

Petterson, the American ambassador to Sudan during the early 1990s, has it wrong. The ‘primary locus’ for policymaking vis-à-vis Sudan during the 1990s was Otello, an Italian restaurant near Washington’s Dupont Circle. Here a group of seven ‘wonks’, calling themselves ‘the Council’, met (Hamilton, 2012). ‘Wonk’ is the term for those with a great interest, some might say an obsession, with details of political policy. The Council wonks regarded themselves as good folk, righteous humanitarians; and it was they, not the ambassador roasting out in the backwater of Khartoum, who had a disproportionate influence upon US Sudanese policy. This was they had a thing about the Sudan. First, the wonks are presented.

Council actors

The first Council member was Brian D’Silva. He had met with John Garang in 1978 when the two were graduate students in agricultural economics. Charismatic to many who met him, US Army trained, Garang led the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the military arm of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). D’Silva became Garang’s champion in the United States. Francis Deng, from southern Sudan, was a second member of the Council. Yale educated, he was a Sudanese diplomat and scholar, who had become a US resident, with positions at such institutions as the US Institute of Peace, the Brookings Institution and Johns Hopkins University. He offered other Council members connections to southern Sudan.

Roger Winter and John Prendergast were two important members who came from humanitarian work, especially in the Sudan. Winter, called by one admirer ‘a Saint’ (Griswold, 2008), had worked in the Carter administration, but ‘vowed never to work in the government again, preferring the less bureaucratic non-government sector’ (Hamilton, 2012: 4). So in 1981 he became the executive director of the US Committee for Refugees. One document reported Prendergast to be a ‘rockstar’ (Beaty, 2013). He was identified by his speakers’ bureau as a ‘human rights activist’ and a ‘friend’ of George Clooney (American Program Bureau, 2013).

Ted Dagne was another Council member. He was an Ethiopian refugee, who worked in a variety of positions in the US Congress, and established an ‘intense friendship’ with Garang (Hamilton, 2012: 2). At some point in the mid-1990s, Susan Rice, at the time rapidly rising within the State Department ranks, became a Council member; as did Eric Reeves, an English professor at Smith College. Rice would turn out to be the most powerful member of the group. Reeves, a Shakespeare and Milton expert, would turn out to be its fiercest polemicist. Playfully, the group nicknamed each other in a grand manner. Dagne was the ‘Emperor’; Reeves was ‘Deputy Emperor’; Winter was the ‘Spear Carrier’; Prendergast was the ‘Councillor in Waiting’; and Deng was the ‘Diplomat’. Rice and D’Silva do not seem to have had nicknames. However, these humanitarians were not play-acting during their restaurant trysts, they were plotting.

It might be asked, who really were the Council members – bon vivant humanitarians chowing down at a DC watering hole, or something more ominous? Keith Harmon Snow, the progressive war correspondent who covers Africa, thought he saw something darker. Rice, Winter, Prendergast and Dagne operated in other areas of Africa, especially the Horn and Great Lakes, ‘supporting and covering up’ Western low-intensity military operations (Snow, 2012). He identified them as ‘intelligence operatives’ (Snow, 2012). Further, he quoted Jean Marie Higiro, an official at one time in the Rwandan government, as saying, ‘Roger Winter is an intelligence operative’ (Snow, 2012). Spain’s Juan Carrero Saralegui, a human rights activist with expertise in Rwanda, has also identified Winter as an intelligence officer (Snow, 2012: 9). It is not unusual for the CIA to covertly insert personnel into private institutions and NGOs functioning in areas that the intelligence community has an interest. Winter’s position as executive director of the US Committee for Refugees would be just such a position. Alan Boswell, reporting for McClatchy, observed that Dagne in 2012, while working in the new Republic of South Sudan, was ‘an embedded go-between, and source of intelligence’ (2012), and if he was an intelligence ‘source’ in 2012, it is not improbable that he served the same function during the 1990s. Next discussed is what was the Council’s thing about Sudan.

The thing, their hermeneutic

A way of grasping the thing of their intrigues is by revealing the hermeneutic the Emperor and his Council brought to their interpretations?¹ First, and foremost it was a narrow one. Though the Council operated throughout Africa, the reality they focused upon at the Otello was the puzzle of the Sudan. Specifically, perceptually they understood Sudan as a place with a civil war, pitting Muslim north against Christian south; and as Winter put it, as reported by New York Times correspondent Eliza Griswold, in Sudan, ‘there’s a good guy and a bad guy’ (Griswold, 2008). The ‘bad guy’ was the Sudanese government in Khartoum led by Omar al-Bashir. It terrorised its own population. The ‘good guy’ was the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and its political arm the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), in the south. Perhaps the Council’s affection for the SPLA/M originated in their ‘respect for Garang’ (Hamilton, 2012: 4). Winter put the good guy/bad guy matter as follows, ‘You have these well-trained guys in Khartoum who are murderers and never keep an agreement’ (Hamilton, 2012: 4). Of course, members of the Council acknowledged the SPLA ‘fighters committed horrific crimes during the war’ (Hamilton, 2012: 4). There were within the SPLA different factions which fought each other. Perhaps, the most enduring strife pitted Riek Machar against first Garang and then his successor, Salva Kiir. Additionally, there were southern factions outside of the SPLA which fought each other and the SPLA. All this conflict tended to utilise terrorist tactics. Prendergast’s own book Crisis Response: Humanitarian Band-AIDS in Sudan and Somalia explicitly announced that the SPLA/M ‘terrorized the southern population’ (1997). So the Council’s perceptual interpretation of Sudan as divided into good and bad guys was a misinterpretation. Both sides in the civil warring terrorised, so the country was actually divided into bad guys and bad guys.

Just how ‘bad’ did the Council think the Khartoum ‘bad guys’ were? Here Prendergast expressed the Council’s views when he told Rice that al-Bashir’s government was ‘too deformed to be reformed’ (Hamilton, 2012: 3). Reeves went further, labelling al-Bashir’s government, ‘a serially genocidal regime’ (2004). Strong words, which implied either that Khartoum should undergo regime change or that Sudan should be dismembered by providing backing to SPLA ‘good guys’ to do the job. Reeves, when Bush II was implementing violent regime change in Iraq, jumped at the idea of doing the same in Sudan; but most Council members supported the latter possibility. Backing the south they believed should come in many forms – ranging from propaganda monsterising the ‘Arab’ north to assisting the SPLA in its fighting.

Thus, the Council’s hermeneutic, perceptually, was that Sudan was divided into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’; and, procedurally, that support up to, and including, military intervention should be accorded to the ‘good guys’; though it should supplied covertly so the United States could be viewed as humanitarian ‘good guys’. There was nothing especially humanitarian here. The Council was a clique of Washington security elites pursuing an imperial goal of control in yet another world region, and their policy to achieve this followed from their interpretation of the situation in Sudan. Defeat the ‘bad guy’ by supporting the ‘good guy’.

They implement their hermeneutic

The Council members’ ability to implement their policy goal derived from the positions they held in the Clinton administration. The most powerful person was Susan Rice. She ‘grew up with … privilege and … connections’ (O’Neal Parker, 1998). It was during the 1990s that those ‘connections’ paid off. Rice received her doctorate in 1990. Three years later she joined the National Security Council (NSC). In 1995 she became the NSC Director for Africa, a post she held for two years. After which, in 1997, she switched to the State Department – nine months after her lifelong family friend, Madeleine Albright, became secretary of state – and was appointed the assistant secretary of state for Africa, the highest position in the US government dealing with African affairs. Privilege has its plunder: seven years from her doctorate, age 33, Susan Rice was the security elite who ran Africa for the US government.²

Rice had her advisors. John Prendergast, her Council compatriot, was important among these. In 1996, she brought him into the NSC, and when she left, he replaced her as the Africa director. Roger Winter at this time remained with the US Committee for Refugees but was believed to be her ‘closest advisor on Africa’ (EIR Investigative Team, 1998). Rice, Prendergast and Winter were a ‘team’ Winter said in September 1997 ‘to lead the United States into support of a war against the government of Sudan’ (Hassan, 2009). They would, we shall see, not only lead the United States to support a war against Khartoum, but to covertly conduct it.

D’Silva and Dagne played supporting roles in the Council ‘team’. D’Silva went on to a career in the USAID, specialising in the Sudan, from which position he argued the case for southern Sudan. Dagne worked for the US Congress and for much of the time he was employed by the Congressional Research Service, an institution whose function is to provide Congress with the ‘objective’ information it needs to legislate. Dagne wrote reports about Sudan, a number of which were notorious for their bias in favour of the SPLA (see Dagne, 1997, 2002). He went on to work for the House of Representatives Sub-Committee on Africa, where, with the assistance of Representative Donald Payne, he created a network of pro-southern Sudan representatives.

The Emperor also had something of an intelligence role within the Council. This is because, as Herman Cohen, Bush I’s administration assistant secretary of state for Africa, remembered, Dagne was a ‘good friend’ of SPLA leader John Garang, and would host meetings for him in his Washington home (Cohen, 2000: 83). Rebecca Hamilton described ‘an intense friendship’ between Garang and Dagne; in the course of which ‘they spoke on the phone every day’ (2012: 2–3). These phone calls clearly provided considerable SPLA/M intelligence, which was certainly shared with other Council members, and allowed them to coordinate their southern Sudanese politics.

By the mid-1990s, Rice and Prendergast occupied the two highest positions concerning Africa in the NSC and the State Department. Their superiors, first Anthony Lake and then Sandy Berger in the NSA, and first Warren Christopher and then Madeleine Albright in Foggy Bottom, were not Africanists, and were distracted by more pressing events, especially in the Balkans. D’Silva and Dagne gave the Council strong representation in the USAID and Congress. Dagne gave them the best, latest, inside information on what was happening in Sudan from the perspective of the SPLA leader. The Otello plotters might be said to have established a near complete understanding among US foreign policy elites over the ‘truth’ of their interpretation of the situation in the Sudan. Consequently, in the 1990s it was hard to be pro-Khartoum when the Council told everybody al-Bashir’s government was ‘too deformed to be reformed’.³ What was the consequence of this near monopoly over knowledge of the Sudan situation?

By 1995 Rice was at the NSC, joined a year later by Prendergast. By 1997, Rice was promoted to assistant secretary of state for Africa and Prendergast was in charge of Africa in the NSC. Khartoum was trying to reconcile with the United States. Prendergast and Rice were arguing against accepting these attempts. Late in 1997, Prendergast announced that the US government viewed the al-Bashir regime as ‘the principle threat to US security interests on the Continent of Africa today’ (in Hoile 1999: 8). On 5 November 1997, Executive Order 13067 was issued. In it Clinton echoed, and upped, the rhetorical level of Prendergast’s words. Khartoum was said to ‘constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States’ (Executive Order 13967, 1997: 1). Hereafter, US policy formally sought to harm the ‘bad guy’ by helping the ‘good guy’. At this juncture, the impatient reader may expostulate, ‘Pip pip, my good man – make some points, make some connections’!

Getting to the point

A ‘point’ in social pointillism is an abstraction concerning forces (causes) and their powers (effects) at specific places over certain times; more specifically, it is particular actors at a place in time with certain forces that create certain powers. Points might be imagined of as incandescent, due to their concentration of force and power. Force, as I use the term, is not solely physical coercion or violence, though on occasions it is. Rather, the concept is employed in a more general sense, as cause. Causes are brought about due to operation of ‘force resources’. Utilisations of force resources are ‘exercises of force’.

There are five varieties of such resources. The first of these involves ‘instruments’ – tools, monies (capital), technologies, etc. – things that individuals have devised that when used make things happen. The second force resource is ‘land’, raw materials that people use when they make things happen. A third force resource is ‘actors’, individuals performing practical or discursive action. ‘Discursive’ action is use of the body to write or speak. ‘Practical’ action is use of the body, usually with tools, to get something done. Labour, of course, has been a particularly important sort of practical action in economic groups. Actors act upon their desires, formed on the basis of their hermeneutic preferences. Elite actors’ desires are said to be délires, because they are so powerful that they control large numbers of people. Actors’ desires and délires form the fourth and fifth force resources at their disposal.

‘Culture’ is a fourth force resource, involving signs of the times learned and shared by people; with signs being representations (or representations of representations) about being. Cultural representations function as messages communicating the perceptual and procedural interpretations of hermeneutics. Procedural interpretations choreograph the exercise of force, that is, organise when and how force resources will be deployed in space over time. Together actors’ perceptual and procedural messages are their desires or délires. Elite délires that have been institutionalised by laws, public policies, administrative regulations, royal decrees, fatwas, etc., are said to be public délires.

‘Authoritative’, the fifth force resource, is the right, in some way institutionally granted, to choreograph specific force resources in specific perceived situations to achieve délires. Exercises of force are the utilisation of discursive actions communicating cultural or authoritative messages to choreograph other force resources. Choreographed together, force resources are causes that get things done; and getting things done is having effects, the attainment of powers. Some powers include the effects of one point upon another. A ‘field of power’ is a place of connected points: a ‘picture’ of incandescent points strung together with other points. Critically, if this ‘picture’ is to be accurate, it must be shown how the forces at one point have powers over other points.⁴

Consequently, getting to the point in a social pointillist methodology involves detection of fields of power, which sleuth work requires performance of two empirical chores. The first concerns analysis of points’ force situations. This involves observation of what the force resources are at a point and how they are exercised. The second concerns analysis of points’ connection situations. This consists of discovery of powers generated by a point’s exercise of force, which includes discovery of those powers that points have over other points. Powers of one point upon another are the connections between points. Let us apply this social pointillism.

Connecting the points: a US/Sudanese field of power

Recall that points are abstractions so, with this in mind, let us designate the Council and all its various actions as the Council point. First considered is its force situation, followed by its connection situation.

Force situation

The inventory of the Council’s force resources begins by observing that its action was provided by the six male and one female member. These actors did not rely upon land force resources to achieve their powers. Rather, to do so they wielded discursive action and authoritative resources, which they choreographed with certain instruments (especially money and certain tools).

The Council’s actors interpreted the situation in the Sudan, and from this hermeneutic practice derived a cultural message. The perceptual part of the message concerned Sudan’s moral geography. The North, specifically the Khartoum government, was the ‘bad guy’. The South, especially the SPLA/M, was the ‘good guy’. The procedural part of their message followed from its perceptual understanding. If Khartoum was the ‘bad guy’, it was ‘too deformed to be reformed’. If the SPLA/M was the ‘good guy’ it was to be supported. This was their délire.

Council members used discursive action to disseminate their délire throughout different US institutions. Dagne was important in lining up support for it in the US Congress. Lauren Blanchard has noted that there was ‘no country’ other than Sudan ‘on which Congress … focused greater attention’ (2012: 1). Representative Payne, through whom Dagne worked, sponsored passage of a congressional resolution endorsing South Sudanese right of self-determination (Hamilton, 2012). D’Silva argued for the Council’s cultural message on Sudan within the USAID, itself a part of the State Department. Winter and Deng supported it in areas where they had influence, broadly speaking among Washington’s humanitarian and governmental elites. Reeves argued the Council’s case across a diverse range of advocacy groups that demonised the Muslim North and praised the Christian South in the Sudan. In general, it might be said that the Council throughout the 1990s was effective in generating a hermetic seal both in US civil society and in government, sealing in understanding that SPLA/SPLM were ‘good guys’ and sealing out any recognition of al-Bashir’s Arabs as having any redeeming qualities.

Against this background, Rice and Prendergast acted. They were situated in the Council point in high positions within the State Department and the president’s NSC, which gave them considerable authoritative resources; one of which was the right to help shape US policy towards Africa. Their délire was that the Council culture message could become US government policy vis-à-vis Sudan. And they did succeed in their délire! ‘From 1995 … onwards the United States government began to militarily, diplomatically, and financially support the SPLA’ (ESPAC, 1998: 7). The 1997 Executive Order 13067 designated Khartoum an ‘extraordinary threat’ to US national security. Hereafter, Khartoum was authorised as an enemy, and the SPLA/M as an ally to destroy the enemy. This meant that the authoritative resource of Council members, their key force resource, had had the power of creating a particular public délire, the authorisation of exercise of US government force resources against Khartoum’s ‘extraordinary threat’ to US national security. It is time to turn to the Council point’s connection situation.

Connection situation

Implementation of the Council point’s public délire achieved powers in two Sudanese points – one in the Khartoum government, the other in the SPLA/M. However, these Sudanese points were influenced by those in the countries that served as proxies for US policy (primarily Uganda, Eritrea and Israel). Recall that US operations in Sudan during the 1990s were largely covert. There is little information concerning how US force resources were exercised in the Sudanese and proxy points. However, broad outlines of the situation can be indicated.

Armed with the authoritative resource of US policy to utilise US government force resources against the Khartoum point, US security elites choreographed movement of instruments of war to the proxy points and from the proxy points to the SPLA/M. Who the actors were in the transfer of force resources, what their magnitudes were and how their movements were choreographed is unknown. Remember that, with the exception of the food transfers, these instruments of war flowed secretly. However, they did occur. Food, weapons and training reached the SPLA point. In 1996, $20 million of military equipment was moved through the proxy points, which the United States called ‘frontline’ states, to the SPLA. Probably a good deal of further funding came from covert sources in the CIA. US commandos were on the ground at times during the fighting (Hassan, 2009). One informant related how he saw huge truck convoys bring war supplies across the border from Uganda into southern Sudan.

Two main forms of violent force resources were supplied. The first was ‘humanitarian’ aid that came in the form of food; in principle, provided to the civilian population for famine relief. Food became a weapon in two ways. First, a fair portion of it was taken by the SPLA to feed its own personnel. If, as Frederick the Great quipped, ‘an army marches on its stomach’, then the United States was responsible for filling SPLA stomachs. The second way that food served as a weapon had to do with Khartoum’s strategy against the South. It lacked the ability to defeat the SPLA in the field. So it planned to starve it into submission. However, US provision of food to southerners weakened this strategy. The second sort of violent force resources provided by Washington were more conventional and included weapons and training. These, however, were provided by US proxies in the 1990s and early 2000s – making it appear that their provision was independent of the United States.

There are questions about how significant US support of the SPLA’s was to Khartoum’s defeat. Autesserre asserts that American assistance was ‘not enough to enable them to win the war’ (2002: 1). However, she was writing prior to the termination of the Second Sudanese War. Nick Turse reported in 2014 that, ‘For more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in Washington and beyond championed [the] rebel forces’ of the SPLA (2014). Secretary of State John Kerry confided in 2012 that the United States ‘helped midwife the birth of South Sudan’ (in Turse, 2014) Of course, Washington’s backing was largely covert, but that ‘midwife’ was the Council. By the beginning of the 2000s, Khartoum sought to bring the civil war to a close. This was accomplished in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Below a broader, ontological implication is revealed concerning the just performed social pointillist analysis.

Starry nights

And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? … a play of forces. (Nietzsche)

Force ‘has shown us how to explain all the changes of motion which bodies experience, and how to think about all physical phenomena’. (Peirce)

In effect, this section makes points about points. The first of which concerns an ontology of starry nights, whose exposition will turn upon Neitzsche’s and Peirce’s appreciation of the significance of force.⁵ Germane to this discussion is further consideration of the notion of the field which has played an important part in discussion of the doings at the Otello.⁶ Fields were concepts in the part of physics called classical field theory, which was especially important in theories that explained electromagnetism and gravitation. Here fields were conceptualised as places of electromagnetic and gravitational force, with these imagined as central forces of nature (Landau and Lifshits, 1971). By the end of the first half of the 20th century, the concept had migrated from physics to psychology and the social sciences. Kurt Lewin, more than anyone, was responsible for bringing the concept from physics into the human sciences; retaining the connection between fields and force, with ‘force fields’ understood as social places where vectors of force influenced individual behaviour (1951: 39).

The concept diffused from Lewin to anthropologists assembled around Max Gluckman at Manchester University in the 1950s and 1960s.⁷ He spoke of anthropologists having a ‘field of study’ (Devons and Gluckman, 1964: 158), literally making fields – not society, culture, kinship, etc. – the object of study in social analyses. Other Manchester School members developed the structural substance of fields linking them to networks and games of goal attainment. Barnes (1554), Epstein (1967) and Mitchell (1969) understood fields as networks or networks of networks. Turner considered fields to be ‘the totality of relationships between actors oriented to the same prizes and values’ (1974: 127). Pierre Bourdieu has shown fields to be of capital importance in sociology, insisting upon the ‘logic of fields’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 94–115). Bourdieu’s field seems derived from that of the Manchester School, for it is ‘defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions’, which network involves ‘structure of the distribution of power’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 97). Bourdieu’s fields of the ‘structure of … power’ resemble those of Turner in that they are something of a ‘game’ in which actors ‘concur in their belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 98).

Most recently, Nina Glick Schiller and her collaborators have extended the notion of field into global systems research showing its utility for theorising transnationalism (Basch, Schiller and Szanton, 1994). She continues the tradition of understanding fields in terms of networks and power, defining them as ‘networks of unequal power that may be locally situated or extended nationally or transnationally’ (Schiller and Çağlar, 2013: 499).

The treatment of fields in the Otello story has continued understanding fields as places and times of force and power; but broadens that understanding by assigning to it an ontological significance. It is at this juncture that Neitzsche and Peirce – naughty boys of 19th-century philosophy – become relevant.⁸ Nietzsche, coming from a more metaphysical corner, asked ‘What is “the world”…?’ By putting ‘the World’ in quotation marks, he was really asking, ‘What is being or reality?’ He answered this question by saying it was a ‘play of forces’. Peirce, occupying a pragmatic corner, elaborated upon Nietzsche, by explaining what forces did, in effect, clarifying why they were so important; and what they did was ‘to explain all changes of motion’.

Recall ontology is speculation not about being itself, but about, once it has been observed, its fundamentals. So what is the nature of being? According to the Nietzsche/Peirce view it is ‘force’ at ‘play’ changing ‘motion’, making it the producer of what happens – all that happens, Peirce emphasised. This response to the question of the nature of being raises another question: what is force and what is motion? Here, analysis of the Council provides an answer. Force is causes. Motion is the effect of causes. The idea that force is at ‘play’ rests comfortably with Bourdieu’s and Turner’s beliefs that fields are places where there are games with prizes to be won. The Council won the prize of dismembering Sudan in the game to decide Sudan’s future.

Elsewhere (Reyna, forthcoming) I have used a metaphor of a starry night to illuminate this Nietzsche/Pierce ontology. Being, including the human being, is a place of stars. These stars are points of fiery force that produces powers. Over time there is motion in the starry firmament as the force of different points connects, in the sense of having powers over, other points. Fields of power in this ontology are ways of knowing about starry nights. This leads us to a second, methodological point concerning how to study fields of power in the starry night of the human being.

The social pointillism applied to the Otello wonks is a methodology for constructing fields of power. Because such fields are places of causality it is important to know what causality is. Certain anthropologists, perhaps influenced by Geertz (1973), are sceptical of causality. Reyna (2002: 90–98) discussed debates pertaining to causality, found a number of these plausible, especially those of Miller (1987) and Salmon (1998). Hume called causality ‘the cement of the universe’ (1739: 662). Here is a powerful trope that certainly makes causality important because it is the ‘cement’ holding everything together. But I think Hume has got it wrong. Causality is not about concrete but about motion, for as the epistemologist Wesley Salmon puts it, ‘Causal processes are the means by which structure and order are propagated … from one space-time region of the universe to other times and places’ (1998: 298: italics in the original). Something ‘propagated’ is something moved.

In such a view of causality, the analyst must establish: 1) regions of space-time order, and 2) producers that oblige the order. By ‘spatio-temporal order’ one means that there are observations establishing certain regions detected to come before being followed by those that come after. For example, it has been established that smoking is a region in space and time that is antecedent to cancer, which comes subsequently. By ‘producers’ one means that events emanating from the antecedent region in some way oblige what occurs in the subsequent region. A spatiotemporal order has been established between smoking and cancer, but it is unknown how smoking produces cancer. The ‘producer’ is missing. Causes are the antecedent space-time regions. Effects are the subsequent space-time regions.

In social pointillism, as the analysis of the Council and its effects made clear, points are places where cause and effect occur. Causes are forces and effects are powers. Exercise of force resources is the producer connecting points. A field of power, the starry night of the human being, is points connected to other points, with it the observation of how antecedent points produce connections with subsequent points. This means that social pointillists have the following empirical tasks to perform in order to establish as a field of power:

Points of antecedence and subsequence must be observed, including discovery of the force resources in each point:

Hermeneutic politics must be observed to establish how force resources at each point will be exercised.

Observations must be made showing how the exercise of force resources in antecedent points produces powers in subsequent points.

This article concludes by showing how social pointillism has removed clouds obscuring the starry night of the US/Sudanese field of power.

Conclusion

A field of power opened during the 1990s involving four points of star light – those of the Otello, the proxy states, Khartoum and the SPLA/M. Spatiotemporally, at time T₁ antecedent exercise of force in the Council point had subsequent power in the proxy points; at time T₂ antecedent exercises of force in the proxy points had subsequent power in the SPLA point; at time T₃ antecedent exercises of force in the SPLA point had power in the Khartoum point. To begin construction of the US/Sudanese field of power, Council wonks conducted a hermeneutic politics which established how US force resources would be exercised and acquired power over US government Sudanese policymaking. They achieved this power in the form of an authority resource that specified how the US government intervened in the Sudanese civil war. Specifically, this authority resource directed US government actors to supply to actors in the proxy points violent force resources in the form of instruments of war (weapons, training and food). Subsequently, proxy point actors transferred the violent force resources to the SPLA. Subsequent to action in the proxy points, the SPLA exercised their newly acquired violent force resources to help achieve the power of defeating Khartoum. The motion in this field of power, what connected the points to each other, was a flow of violent force resources, and it was their violence that was the causal producer in this field. So what is a virtue of this social pointillism? By connecting the points, it has removed the clouds from the US/Sudanese field of power revealing an unexpected social reality and, in so doing, explained why at least in some measure the SPLA was able to defeat Khartoum in the Sudanese civil war. Who knew what was happening in Sudanese battlefields during the 1990s began with some wonks at an Italian restaurant out by Dupont Circle?

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is in memory of George Bond, an extraordinary person in so many ways, one of which was his delight in making connections. The article was originally presented at ‘The Politics of Knowledge: Honoring the Work and Times of George Clement Bond’, American Anthropological Association, 2014 Annual Meetings, Washington, DC.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Stephen Reyna is an editor of Anthropological Theory. He wrote Connections: Brain, Mind and Culture in a Social Anthropology (2003), co-edited Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil (2011), and has authored Deadly Contradictions: The New American Empire and Global Warring (2016).

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